Tuesday 4 February 2014

Nepa, Nalpa, Suba, Notlif! (episode 2)

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Grüße an die Leser unser Blog aus Deutschland
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OK. A pen, A plan, A bus - Filton.

Following fbb's inconsequential brain workings (?), the crazy old man's title looked more interesting backwards; and there was a passing and illogical resonance with a well known palindromic sentence outlining the genius of Ferdinand de Lesseps.

It is well-known that Leigh Mercer published his immortal "A man, a plan, a canal : Panama!" in the November 13 1948 issue of Notes & Queries, but many suspect hat the tag is very much older.

The Canal (Spanish: Canal de Panamá) is a 77.1-kilometre (48 mile) ship canal in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) to the Pacific Ocean. The canal cuts across the Isthmus of Panama and is a key conduit for international maritime trade. There are locks at each end to lift ships up to Gatun Lake, an artificial lake created to reduce the amount of excavation work required for the canal, 26 metres (85 ft) above sea level. The current locks are 33.5 metres (110 ft) wide.

A third, wider lane of locks is currently under construction and is due to open in 2015.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with a Community Bus service in Filton to the north of Bristol.

fbb as already expressed some disquiet about the map in the pen. See yesterday's blog (read again). It is all wrong. We will check the route at an arbitrary start, namely Southmead Hospital.
The bus does a tour of the hospital site, passing the terminus/timing point of the "proper" bus services ...
... which the Filton Flyer calls AOC.
The Hospital plan (of which the above is an extract) doesn't admit to the presence of buses; nasty smelly big things, who would want to travel on one of those! Our Friendly 555 ..
... continues anticlockwise via the biggest Job Centre in the galaxy on Monks Park Road ...
... going on, widdershins, via a schoolteacher's headgear (these days only worn in Bash Street) but which doesn't refer to the big Orchard School  on Gloucester Road but the much smaller Shield Road Primary School. That's on Shield Avenue, a little chunter off Filton Avenue (bottom right) ...
... where you can see a shopping trolley outside the co-op.
By now even a non resident of Brizzle might have grasped that the bus and its whirly arrow is NOT going the wrong way round the roads; it's going the right way round a totally wrong-way round map! Bingo!

We can just about follow the route to Sainsburys ...
And on to Bristol Parkway station where we are about half way round the circle; and where our Bristol correspondent snapped the 555 as it sped by.
Perhaps if we are struggling with the pen-map, we could try Traveline. Thy don't just have a map, they have two. This one is not too inviting, but it may help us. At least it is based on real geography but, oddly, it doesn't show which way round the bus goes.
And there is a strange gap near Sainsburys (roundabout, centre right) where the bus teleports to the planet Zog for a few moments. Undaunted by this temporal anomaly ...
... (ye canna change the laws of Physics, Cap'n); we will press on regardless in tomorrow's blog.

Following on from the irrelevance of the "Panama" palindrome, fbb came across this; it's even less relevant, but fun all the same.

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal--Panama!

A "percale" is a bed cover, "coloratura" is an operatic term; but whether a transliterated Greek work "heros" is allowable is doubtful. "heroes" is the correct plural of "hero".
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What a difference a day makes!
Sunday Sidmouth Sunshine, BUT
Seaton Sea-foam Snow - yesterday.
Environment Agency blokes gazing, Canute-like, out to sea.
High tide 0856.
Waves half-way up the cliff at Seaton Chine.
fbb's morning constitutional curtailed!
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 Next bus blog : Wednesday 5th February 

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